This article appeared in Coronet magazine’s March 1954 issue
For 70 years National machines have rung up a story of success
Romance of the Cash Register
By Mort Weisinger
When a blindfolded contestant on a recent radio quiz show was asked to guess the identity of “a common, everyday business appliance” from the sound of its operation, he won the jackpot by tagging the object as a National cash register.
Listening audiences complained that this prize question had been too easy, that the electric whirr and strident jingle of a National cash register is one of the most familiar sound effects in the world.
In 92 different countries and trading areas, it is a sonic coat-of-arms that stands for cash and carry. The machines are operated by Eskimos in the Arctic Circle and by Bantus below the Equator, by vendors in the Flea Market of Paris and by Algerian merchants in the casbah. They ring up sales wherever men trade in francs, liras, cruzeiros, florins, guilders, piasters, kroner, yen, shillings, and even Russian kopecks.
The greatest amount that can be recorded at one time on a cash register is $999,999.99. The smallest amount is one mill, used in some states for recording a sales tax. But whether used to ring up a mill or a million, it is a safe bet that you come in contact with one of these machines several times a day.
For example, when you shop at most supermarkets, thanks to a National cash register, you can see how much each item costs as it is rung up and how much you owe for the total bill.
The average register, with 7,500 intricate parts, is a faithful financial servant whose push-button wizardry performs all sorts of monetary magic. Lending libraries use them to record card numbers as well as cash received. Taxi, dairy and laundry offices often use registers to check in drivers and to record money, merchandise, and gasoline on individual trucks and cars. Fuel dealers use them to record tons and pounds of coal, gallons of fuel oil and to provide delivery records, as well as to handle cash.
Restaurants and hotels use registers for checking food from the kitchen to the dining room. The register, often a battery of registers, is placed in a location between the kitchen and the dining room.
The waiter makes a record of the food order and the register’s printed figure becomes a requisition for him to receive the food from the kitchen. The price of the food is charged to the waiter’s total inside the register and he must collect from the customer and then, at the end of his shift, pay the restaurant the total amount charged against him.
There are cash registers with Braille keys for use by the blind, and sensitive electric models which can be operated by amputees with artificial hands. For use in such places as school cafeterias, there is a portable midget number which rings up amounts from one cent to $2.99. The largest register in the NCR catalogue is an 18-drawer model, specially built for businesses where a large number of salespeople have access to the same machine and each requires a separate cash tray which only he can unlock.
Not to be overlooked is the jumbo-sized cash register of all time, a device about three stories high. Perched atop the company’s exhibition hall at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, it soared 74 feet in the air and performed a superstatistical service by registering each day’s attendance on a mammoth indication panel four feet high and 26 feet long.
It was man’s age-old desire for possessions and the problems of counting them that led from the primitive use of pebbles, knotted ropes, notch-sticks, and the abacus to the invention of “The Cash,” as it was first called. The romantic story of its birth begins about four million National machines ago, in the era of tandems, gaslight, bustles, and wooden Indians.
In 1879, James Ritty, an ex-mechanic who had invested his saving in a café in Dayton, Ohio, pondered the paradox that while his establishment was doing a flourishing business, he kept losing money. It required no Sherlock Holmes to detect the reason. The only receptacle for receipts was a cash drawer which could easily be dipped into, with the result that bartenders were able to pilfer as much as they desired.
Ritty brooded so much over these peculations that he suffered a breakdown and was obliged to take a cruise for his health. One morning, as he stood fascinated before the automatic mechanism which clocked the revolutions of the ship’s propeller shaft, he asked himself: “If the movements of a ship’s propeller can be recorded, why can’t a device be built to record sales?”
From that moment, amid the fumes and clatter of a ship’s engine room, the idea of a cash register obsessed Ritty. Returning to Dayton, he began to work on the device that was to make mechanical history.
The first model had two rows of keys across the lower front of each machine. Pressed down, each key represented the amount of money to be recorded. The sales were registered by a revolving arrow on a dial face similar to that of a wall clock. There was no cash drawer in this earliest effort.
In a later model, Ritty mounted a wide paper roll inside the machine so that when a key was depressed, it pricked a hole in the tape. Thus, at the end of the day, the proprietor could remove the tape and count the holes in each column. If there were ten holes in the five-cent column, he could see that he had done a 50-cent business in five-cent sales. He could repeat the counting of holes in each of the other columns and then add them up to arrive at the grand total of sales for the day.
In time, Ritty substituted a series of wheels for the paper roll, which kept a record of the number of times each key was operated and eliminated the necessity of counting holes. But his most dramatic innovation was the introduction of a drawer and a bell that rang sharply when the key was depressed and the drawer opened. This compelled the clerk to ring up a sale in order to have access to the drawer.
Here, at last, was real protection. The customer benefited in that the indicator showed the amount registered on the sale. And the proprietor warmed to the machine because it made the clerk responsible for every cent rung up during the day. Nevertheless, Ritty was unable to market the device and reluctantly sold his infant invention for $1,000 to Jacob H. Eckert, a glassware salesman.
Although “The Cash” was now functional enough to serve as an automatic policeman, its manufacturers encountered terrific resistance when they tried to sell the machines to merchants, who dismissed it as an expensive fad. What saved the register from the limbo of countless other gadgets was the truth behind the maxim: “If a man can…make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor…the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
In this case, the world was John H. Patterson, an erect, wiry man with a bristling mustache. Patterson, a coal dealer and the owner of a general store in Coalton, Ohio, found that he was losing $6,000 yearly instead of making a profit of $12,000, which the figures said was due him.
One day, standing unobserved in his store, Patterson noted that certain miners waited to buy from certain clerks. Inspecting a miner’s basket, he found him charged with only half the goods he had actually received. Patterson was now in a dilemma. He saw no way to protect himself against crooked employees unless he kept vigil himself, and this was not feasible. Then something clicked in his mind. He recalled having been told of a newfangled machine being made in Dayton to register sales.
Typical of the man, he telegraphed for three of these machines, C.O.D. Within six months after introducing them on his counters, the store showed a profit.
In 1883, because of a general depression, Patterson gave up his store. After paying off all his debts, he had $16,000 left. Now 40, he regarded himself as a failure. What could he do for a living?
Considering cattle-raising, Patterson visited Colorado with his brother Frank to look at ranches. One day they met a New England merchant who was vacationing.
“How do you do it?” asked John. “Who watches your store?”
The merchant explained that he had a good manager and a couple of those new cash registers being manufactured in Dayton. That night, John Patterson told his brother, “Frank, this man’s experience proves that what was good for our store in Coalton is good for every store. If we can convince merchants of the good these machines can do, they will be used in every store on earth.”
Next morning Patterson boarded a train for Dayton, where he sought out George L. Phillips, a shrewd financier who had bought the patent rights from Eckert and now owned the company. What Patterson did not know was that Dayton businessmen called the cash-register factory “Phillips’ Folly.” The company’s stock was considered worthless.
When Patterson offered $6,500 for the stock, Phillips snapped it up. Later, learning of the company’s shaky status, Patterson offered the financier a $2,000 settlement if he would cancel the deal.
“I wouldn’t take the stock back as a gift,” Phillips said coolly.
“Very well,” replied Patterson, “I am going into the cash-register business. I’ll prove that I can sell honesty to the world.”
Fired with determination, Patterson organized a group of aggressive salesmen. Each he equipped with a miniature three-key model of a section of a cash register, which could be concealed inside a coat pocket and thus thwart the watchdog eyes of antagonistic clerks.
Once inside a store, the salesman would wait for the boss to appear, then whip out the tiny model and demonstrate its financial feats. Invariably, under the baleful glare of the clerk, the proprietor would order a machine.
Patterson also pioneered the modern business college. Each man on his sales force had to attend classes under his personal tutelage. In model stores equipped with dummy merchandise, he made apprentice salesmen act out selling a cash register to a reluctant merchant.
He made them learn a score of different retail trades, so that they could understand the problems of the merchants they had to sell. Then he rehearsed them with a sales talk, until they could recite it from memory.
In many stores where a cash-register was installed, the clerks tried to doublecross the machine. Their tricks were endless. When a patron handed over a quarter for a 15-cent purchase, the clerk, instead of registering the amount, would press the “Change” key so, at the end of the day, the cash in the drawer would not tally with the registration. When Patterson heard of this wrinkle, he abolished the “Change” key and put in its place the “NO SALE” key.
Patterson guaranteed the mechanical perfection of every register to leave his plant. Once, testing a machine which was supposed to have passed inspection, he pushed down a key and nothing happened.
“There seems to be something wrong with this,” he remarked casually to the workers around him. Then he lifted the register from the table to the floor, picked up a mallet and demolished it. On another occasion, he threw crated registers down an elevator shaft to determine whether they had been shock-proof packed.
Such high standards, plus dynamic selling methods, soon made the National cash register a fixture in thousands of stores. Demand for the registers came from every continent, and the NCR became an international houseword.
Meanwhile, numerous improvements were added. Most notable was the receipt which permitted the merchant to give his customers a printed record of the sale.
Up until 1904, the register had been powered by an unwieldy hand-crank. With the U.S. becoming increasingly electrically minded, Patterson decided that the new force could facilitate operation of his machine. Technicians argued that the application of electricity to a cash register was an impossibility.
But they reckoned without a lank, gangling, spectacled youth from the company’s Invention Department who was assigned to the task. The youth studied the problem for three years, then came up with a revolutionary motor run by electricity which made the manual models obsolete. The youth’s name was Charles F. Kettering.
When Patterson bought the business in 1884, it had 13 employees and was housed in a one-room second-floor workshop. From that humble beginning the NCR factory has grown to occupy 28 buildings in Dayton, with over 72 acres of floor space. In addition, the Company operates a factory in Ithaca, N.Y., paper processing plants in Washington Court House, Ohio, and Mechanicsville, N.Y., and plants in Canada, Scotland, Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, and Japan.
The complications of foreign currencies, money of different sizes, and sterling instead of the decimal system in some countries presented problems, but they have been met.
During the last 60 years, NCR has taken out more than 2,000 patents in the U.S., and many others abroad, by way of improving its amazing monetary scoreboard. Its never-ending quest for perfection has paid off fabulously. In 1952, it sold its four-millionth machine and achieved a world wide sales volume of $226,500,000 for the year.
Profits went to the Company’s 15,000 stockholders, located in every state of the Union and in 25 different countries. They include churches, colleges, insurance companies, and trust companies, as well as individuals.
The present boss of NCR is dynamic Stanley C. Allyn, who started with the Company in 1913 as a $20-a-week accountant and worked his way up to become president in 1940. Foreseeing a trend toward mechanization in record-keeping methods among businessmen, Allyn added a new chapter to NCR’s growth by rounding out the line with ingenious accounting, bookkeeping, and adding machines.
Today, when you make a deposit in the savings department of a bank, the chances are the transaction is recorded on a National window-posting machine. Behind the scenes in the offices of banks, other Nationals keep records of checking accounts and fulfill that important function known as central proof.
When you check out of a hotel, your bill is usually printed on a National hotel machine. Most of the telephone bills are made out on a specially developed National, widely used by public utilities.
If you are an employee of a large industrial concern, your pay check is probably made out on a National payroll machine, and one reason that both you and the company like it is the clearly printed check showing gross pay, each deduction, and net pay.
Other NCR machines perform analysis work of all types, industrial accounting, federal, state, and municipal accounting, and railroad, bus-line, and air-line accounting.
Frequently these machines are installed in batteries of 75 to 100. But there are thousands of business establishments where one machine does the complete job. In fact, an outstanding advantage of one particular model is the fact that it can be changed in 30 seconds from one type of work to an entirely different type.
Today, under the leadership of Allyn, one out of every 12 employees at the Dayton plant is actively engaged in research connected with future products. Here, too, and in the recently acquired Computer Research Corporation in Hawthorne, California, technicians are experimenting with the application of electronics to the office machines of tomorrow.
Says one enthusiastic NCR engineer: “Our machines will require so little hand motion they’ll practically be able to respond to telepathic impulses.”
The original paper-roll machine devised by Ritty had 546 parts. Today’s most highly developed National machines contain as many as 22,000. Its calculating devices, with myriad springs, gears, coils, levers, and shafts reaching metal fingers into untold paces, guarantee its performance as an incorruptible keeper of the business conscience.
John H. Patterson passed away peacefully in 1922, content in the knowledge that he had fulfilled his dream to sell honesty to the world.
